Lindsey Myers: IIP Berlin Blog Post #9

I officially have less than two weeks left of my internship and my time here in Berlin! As much as it has flown by, I’d say that I feel ready to come home, or at least see my family again. My parents will be arriving in Berlin in exactly 11 days, and I am beyond excited! I’ve been working on creating a detailed itinerary for all of the things I want them to see here in Berlin and in the Bavarian cities we will be visiting.

With my internship winding down and most of my projects complete, it’s been pretty slow in the office and my days seem to drag on, which definitely doesn’t help when I am literally counting down until I can see my parents! However, with limited days here in Berlin, I’ve been trying to see everything that I have not had the opportunity to see yet. For example, after work today, I’m finally going to the East Side Gallery, which is an area of the Berlin Wall that artists can freely decorate.

This past weekend was actually a really cool experience. I had the opportunity to be reunited with one of the German students I met last summer through the Plus3 Program in Augsburg. He was in Berlin for a work conference, and from all of my Facebook posts, he knew I was there and asked me if I would want to meet up! The funniest thing was that this was actually his first time in Berlin! Showing a native German around his own capital was a very cool experience! I was able to show him all of my favorite places, as well as the main tourists sites, of course. I even shared a lot of fun facts with him about the history of many of the city’s monuments. Doing so made me realize that I’ve truly made Berlin my home this summer. It will always have a place in my heart!

One thing that was also very surprising to me was the fact that my friend, although he’s lived in Germany his whole life, had a hard time understanding the German in Berlin. He kept saying how “strange” the dialect was. So strange, in fact, that he found it easier for him to just speak English with the locals. This definitely made me feel a lot better about having a hard time understanding the German here. When I was in Bavaria last summer, it was much easier for me to hold a conversation with the locals as their German was more traditional and similar to what we learn in our classes. Overall, it was a great day exploring Berlin. The coolest thing was that although we haven’t seen each other in over a year, it had been as if nothing ever changed!